80 PCWorld NOVEMBER 2019FEATURE WHY YOU CAN STOP PAYING FOR AV SOFTWARE
Y
ou don’t need to pay for antivirus
software anymore. Microsoft’s
Windows Defender, a free
service that’s built right into
Windows 10, is now as good as the paid
antivirus/antimalware solutions that have
been collecting your money for years.
There, we said it.
Many PC users became accustomed to
paying for antivirus software for two reasons:
Good, free alternatives were scarce, and
Microsoft offered minimal protection via
Windows, ceding the category to Norton,
Kaspersky, and a host of other third-party
vendors. Windows’ first antimalware efforts
were so abysmal that testing agencies like
AV-comparatives.org and AV-test.org used
Defender as the baseline (i.e., junk) level of
performance. In December 2013, for
example, AV-test.org tested how well 23
antivirus vendors blocked real-world malware
samples using Windows 8.1. Microsoft
finished dead last (go.pcworld.com/wn81).
That was then. Over the intervening years,
Microsoft started taking endpoint security
seriously. In 2019, Microsoft’s own Windows
Defender Antivirus, built right into Windows 10
for free, often outperforms paid services.
(Windows now lumps Windows Defender
Antivirus underneath what it calls Windows
Security, which includes Windows Firewall and
other tools.) It’s not perfect: The incidence of
“false positives,” where legitimate apps are
mistaken for malware, can be high. One testalso noted that it slowed down a low-end PC
more than others do. You can decide for
yourself: Are these “costs” more affordable
than paying $60-plus per year?
We still review the best antivirus apps (go.
pcworld.com/ant1), and there are still some
reasons why you’d want one, which we’ll get
into later. But first let’s look at how far
Windows Defender has come, and how well it
could stand on its own as your primary
antivirus package.WHY YOU SHOULD USE
WINDOWS DEFENDER TO
PROTECT YOUR PC
Two separate testing houses, AV-comparatives
and AV-test, rank Windows Defender nearly at
the top of the products both labs have tested.
It’s important to note that antimalware
testing is a time-intensive process. Even sites
like AV-comparatives use automated tests that
crawl the web and seek out malicious sites
and URLs, trying to reproduce real-world
scenarios that all of us would encounter in our
daily work.
One key point stood out: In
AV-comparatives’ test (go.pcworld.com/
avct), Microsoft was one of the four vendors
(out of a total of sixteen) that didn’t allow any
malware to take over its test systems. Vendors
whose PCs ended up compromised with
malware included big names, such as McAfee
and Symantec. (Malware and protection
mechanisms are constantly evolving.